System.What?

Monday, April 3, 2017

About Brevity

I recently had the chance to give a talk about "Hacking in the Cloud" at Tech Ignite v8. The format requires presenters to deliver their content in 5 minutes or less, in front of a couple hundred attendees, without control over their own slides.

It's a little hair raising, but the format definitely gave this presenter a lesson in conciseness.

To complicate the brevity challenge, I ended up choosing a topic that can be hard to summarize:

What capabilities have cloud computing enabled for the lay person...that used to just be available to big hacking groups?

Just the Highlights

For the all the gory details feel free to watch the video, it's just 5 minutes (see below). TAO did a great job of not only hosting the event (which was wonderful!) but also sharing recorded content with presenters and attendees alike.

For Those With Less Time

For those who don't have 5 minutes, please allow me two bullets:

You can now solve computing problems that used to require whole distributed computing clusters to solve. This lets you take on problems that used to confound the resources of whole University faculties. This same power would also let you temporarily launch a DDoS attack.

You can now crack over 90% of the protected passwords in the world. The tools are open source, the techniques are public, all that's missing is a cluster of rented GPUs in the cloud to speed you along. You can also use this same power for Deep Learning, a buzz word you'll likely be hearing more of as we get better at training computers with new skills.

What It Means For Us (at Axian)

At Axian we love it when technology disrupts convention, and powerful capabilities become commoditized (as is now happening to cloud computing). It levels the playing field and enables our customers to tackle problems that used to only be available to those with deep pockets.

If you like to solve problems, this year has an even bigger inventory of problems that can be solved with data and computing! I can't wait to see what we'll be building in the rest of 2017 :-)

About Me

Tyler Holmes is a Solutions Architect working in Portland, Oregon. He lives mostly in the MS tech stack and is currently treading the waters of Communication/Collaboration and Business Intelligence with off the shelf/open source technologies.